Instructor sergeant Radklif turned out to be a gifted orator. His playful use of words was backed by elaborate arm gestures and extravagant facial expressions. It helped the recruits keep focus during the long days of classes. His storytelling gifts were especially useful during boring subjects like plasma-electric engine schematics and maintenance. Dry subject matters which needed tons of memorizing and repetition. In Voss’ case, it didn’t help that he already knew everything there was to know about them. Ancient technology. Only kept relevant by the fact that they were reliable and cheap to run. Plasma-electric generators were huge by modern standards and impossible to downsize. They had been the best option available when Fosfat was colonized and Saltpetersburg was founded. The city’s water system and backup power plants still ran on plasma-electrics. All of Saltpetersburg was still getting its water pumped around by the same two 2.3 gigawatt plasma-electric engines that had been installed over seven hundred years ago. Daisy and Julie. Names that had since long fallen out of use. Voss knew both machines well, he had been responsible for their annual check ups for the past fifteen years.
‘You, recruit Voss. What’s the first step in activating a plasmatic energybeam conductor?’. The sergeant had a habit of firing unexpected questions in your direction when he thought you weren’t paying attention. He was right in this case. Voss wasn’t paying attention, but he knew the answer anyhow. ‘You preheat the conductor and check if pressure is normal, sergeant.’
‘Good, now stop daydreaming and pay attention. It may save your life some day. The sergeant pretended to whack Voss with the ruler he always had on him. He didn’t actually hit him though. He rarely hit one of his students. The ruler was just part of his excessive persona.
They had gotten beyond the most basic topics now and were getting to more interesting subjects. Today, the sergeant filled the morning with stories about the greater universe. As far as Voss could tell, none of the recruits ever had the privilege of learning about anything beyond Fosfat’s atmosphere. Even Voss had been barred from studying such matters during his time at Herbert. Anything beyond the engineering sections had been off limits to him.
‘When man first attempted long distance space travel, a number of practical problems presented itself. Obvious issues such as the cost of spacefaring and how long it took to travel from planet to planet. Another major one was gravity. Mankind did not evolve to live weightlessly. If we spend too long without gravity, our muscles and bones begin to entropy. Gravity keeps us strong and healthy. So, we came up with several solutions to the gravity problem. One such solution is rotation. The Saltpetersburg spaceport for example, mimics gravity through the use of centrifugal force. Anyone aboard is constantly being thrown out by the rotation, but kept in thanks to solid steel floors. Take the floors out and everyone would be thrown out into the void.
A second solution to the gravity problem are gravity field generators. There are ways to mimic gravity through the use of technology. Gravity field generators never took off though because of how much power you need to keep such a field going. If all our ships came equipped with gravity field generators, we would need a full Deson sphere around our sun just to keep Fosfats ships fuelled. Not economically feasible and thus gravity field generators are rare. I doubt any of you will ever get to board a ship that has one.
Then there’s a third and final solution. Acceleration and deceleration. If you’ve ever been inside a levtrain, you know how rapid acceleration will keep you stuck to your chair. A constant acceleration will cause a constant force pushing you into the other direction. On Fosfat or other planets, you soon run into this thing called friction. The more you try to accelerate, the more air friction you have to overcome. In space there is no such friction. You can keep accelerating at a constant pace for a very long time. This means you can create that feeling of being stuck to your chair accelerating for a very long time, making it a viable way to mimic gravity.
The professor turned around and held up his arms in front of his face. His hands facing him with fingers spread wide. It was as if he wanted to ask the universe why a cruel fate had befallen humanity.
The student sat in front of Voss, a big fellow named Wago, began mimicking the sergeant’s theatrical movements. Voss couldn’t catch his laugh in time and suddenly found himself to be the unfortunate center of attention. Over thirty pairs of eyes were fixated on him. The suspense in them was palpable. Everyone wanted to see how the sergeant would respond to such a blatant transgression. Wago stared at Voss with a devilish grin. The anguish he had caused upon Voss made him gloat. If only the sergeant could have seen Wago’s face, perhaps he would have realized who the true culprit of this disturbance was.
The sergeant himself stood unmoved. His back still facing the room. ‘I have taught many classes to many recruits such as yourselves. In each class, without fail, there is always a clown who thinks he can challenge me, and a know it all who thinks he’s too good for this class. It seems in this class these two jokers have found each other in amusement. Wago, Voss, to the front of the class.’
Voss was dumbfounded. The sergeant hadn’t even turned around to see what had happened or who had laughed. Somehow he just knew. Voss knew trouble awaited him in the front of the class, but worse would be his fate if he didn’t. With heavy feet he got up and walked forward behind Wago, who still showed some bravado in his stride.
‘Seeing as these two clowns weren’t paying attention to my lecture on the importance of acceleration in spacefaring, let me reassert my point by giving them a small demonstration.’. The sergeant had barely finished his sentence when he picked up the stick that was lying on his desk and whacked Voss on the head with seeming superhuman speed. The smack caused him to fall over dazed. His left ear ringing. Wago instinctively put his hands up to protect his face in response and got whacked in the balls instead. He collapsed with a harrowing scream. Half the recruits rescinded as if it had been them that got hit.
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A flurry followed. Voss couldn’t tell how many times either of them got hit by the stick, but it must have been a lot because by the time the sergeant was finished with them, his body was aching all over.
The sergeant gestured for both of them to get back to their seats. Voss’ vestibular organs seemed to have gone on strike because he fell over several times on his way back. It had become particularly difficult to distinguish up from down and left from right. Wago wasn’t in much better shape. Limping back to his chair with both hands covering his crotch. Nothing of his initial bravado remained. The other students were staring down at their desks, scared to make eye contact with Voss, Wago, or the sergeant.
When they were seated again, the sergeant put down his stick and continued as if nothing had happened.
‘Alas, there are limitations to this as well. It’s impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. In fact we haven’t yet discovered a way to go beyond 83 percent of light speed. This means that acceleration can be used to mimic gravity for about seven hours before the speed limit is reached. In reality it’s closer to ten hours though because acceleration will decrease naturally when you get closer to the 83 percent mark. Most large ships don’t have the engine power to accelerate that fast. The freighters many of you will be working on don’t get beyond an acceleration of about 1 meter per second, or about one tenth of what you’re used to here on Fosfat. A severe limitation on how fast and how cheaply we can transport goods interstellarly. The single biggest factor in holding back our economic growth.’
The sergeant sat himself down behind his teacher’s desk with his head burried inside his hands. Voss’ head was throbbing. He had difficulty following the sergeant’s lecture, but he didn’t dare look disinterested after what had just happened. He doubted any of the recruits cared much about the economy though. The economy was a few citizens living lavish lives whilst everyone else was fighting for scraps. Any improvement to it just meant even more lavish lives for the few and the same scraps for everyone else. If anything, they’d love to see the economy collapse. Let those citizens eat dirt.
The sergeant seemed to have recovered from his lamentations about the economy, and continued his story seated.
‘So the first hundred hours of any interstellar flight, there will be simulated gravity, albeit only minor. After that, weightlessness will set in. The final hundred hours of a flight, the engines will be turned into reverse and brake. This will again cause minor gravity. Luckily for you lot, unloading and loading a space freighter can easily take two to three weeks. During that time you will be housed in special quarters aboard space ports. Your time there will allow your bodies to strengthen back up.’
The sergeant’s face turned serious again.
‘There’s another way gravity plays an important role in space travel. When man first set to the stars, interstellar travel could take years, centuries even. They used to put colonists in a cryogenic state and put them on Behmot class ships. Can you imagine that? Saying goodbye to your family and then next thing you know, two hundred years have passed, you wake up in an unknown star system and everyone you once knew is long dead… To make things worse, the early colonists would then have to spend the rest of their lives terraforming their new planet. They didn’t even have a guarantee that the planet they were sent to was sufficiently suitable for terraforming. Ultra long distance scanners were crude and rudimentary in those days. They would go through all these trials and tribulations in the hope that maybe their grandchildren would have a good planet to live on. Many early colonists landed on planets that turned out to be unfit for terraforming. Others would experience engine breakdowns and be left stranded in empty space. These poor souls would be forced to live out their final days hoping for a miracle, whilst their food supplies slowly ran out.’
The sergeant got back up out of his chair. His gestures were becoming bigger again and the excitement shone through his words and facial expressions again.
‘Then, two revolutionary inventions were done within the span of a few years. The Lewen engine and the Pirejet terraformer. Together, these two inventions sped up the entire process a thousand fold. Colonizing new planets now became a process of mere years, rather than centuries. Mankind was suddenly able to colonize dozens of planets each year. Our grasp over the stars exploded. This led to absurd situations where colonists would awake from their two hundred year cryogenic slumber, only to find they had arrived at a planet that was already terraformed and had thousands if not millions of people already living on them.’
The sergeant pointed at a recruit at the back of the class. ‘So what is this Lewen engine?’
‘I don’t know, sergeant.’
The sergeant grabbed a book from his desk and threw it at the recruit. It barely missed him. Nearly hitting recruits seemed to be one of the sergeant’s specialties.
‘Well then, Emil. I suggest you stop looking at the floor then and pay attention. The Lewen engine, also known as a contortion drive, isn’t really an engine. It doesn’t propel you forward. Rather it pulls your destination closer towards you. It does so by creating an extremely directional magnetic gravitational field. The details of this process are extremely complex. Understood by perhaps a thousand people throughout the entire empire and way beyond the scope of these classes, or even my knowledge. You recruits merely have to learn how to maintain them.
After lunch, we’ll get into what the main components of Lewen engines are and how to keep them running smoothly. Each freighter has two Lewen engines. One per main plasma-electric engine. Trust me when I tell you, you want to keep them running smoothly. Because if one of them fails, the gravitational field will get distorted. Even a split second failure is enough to spin you millions of kilometers away from your set course. Lewen engine failures are the number one cause of lost space freighters. If maintained properly, Lewen engines will shorten your travel time by a factor of 1300. Journeys that used to take a hundred years, now take less than a month. To go from one end of the empire to the other, now takes a mere six years. All thanks to mister Lewen’s invention 2000 years ago.
Now, off to lunch with you lot!’. His command was accompanied by wild hand gestures telling them to get out of his class room.
Voss and Wago limped out of class behind the others. Today’s lesson left a serious imprint on them.